March 27, 2012

Bad Ideas of Great Timelessness: Basball Bat, 1890

JF Ptak Sciene Books Quick Post

Some ideas are bad enough to stay that way, possibly forever. Impervious to the future, nothing anywhere ever catches up to them to make them unbad. The design for this baseball bat fits snuggily into that category. Not only is this a bad idea, it is an ugly one, too. I have to say that there is an intrinsic beauty to a baseball bat--its angularity, its diameter-to-length ratio, its color (for the most part), its patina, and even the applied non-Brettian pine tar--that just should not be trampled. (I'm sorry, but baseball bats really need to be the original color of the ash wood--not brown, or black. I'm of course not talking about metal bats which are also in and of themselves a bad idea, "wrong", somewhat like monster golf drivers, not to mention that they can be made in a variety of colors, which simply deepens their wrongness.)

Caveat--none of what I've just said applies if any of these bats are being used by children. Any kid with any bat at any time is perfectly fine. And natural.)

I'm happy that no one felt any particular need to need Mr. Kinst's (patented) bat.

Mr. Kinst as he appeared in 1924. The image is found in the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, and the caption to the photo is as follws: "SUMMARY: Head and shoulders portrait of Emile Kinst, inventor of a baseball bat, looking toward the camera, sitting in front of a light-colored backdrop in a room in Chicago, Illinois."